K Teachers are Crazy

I really went back and forth on using this title, but I decided to go with it just the same. I hope my 29 followers will understand, even though 10 of you are currently teaching kindergarten. I mean the title with absolute love and affection and zero negativity.

To be clear, I student taught in first grade and fourth grade. When I was hired to teach kindergarten, I had little knowledge of how crazy I would become in order to rise to the challenge. I began as all teachers do, by emptying my savings account to buy books, toys and materials that I did not have. I noticed when I opened my craft closet, that all it contained was spilled glitter and two broken doodle boards. At the time, I was newly married and when you are newly married, your spouse is still being sickly sweet to you and agreeing blindly to any purchase you make. Looking back, this is actually a great time to begin a classroom, but I digress.

My biggest challenge came on the evening of open house prior to my first day of actually teaching kindergarten. I was fresh out of college and looked like I had stolen the mannequin clothing right out of a J C Penny entryway. I realized VERY quickly when parents entered through the door, that aint no party like a kindergarten mom judgement zone party. AGAIN, I mean this with absolute love, as I have judged the heck out of adults working with my own minions, but judgement goes to a whole new level in kindergarten. I could see the looks, the looks shared between partner and partner, the looks shared between neighbor and neighbor. The looks spoke volumes and the looks said “How is this 20 something-year-old college grade going to be able to educate little Joselin, in all the ways that SHE DESERVES. She has had zero kids of her own, she has had about twenty seconds in the classroom, she barely got off the plane for her honeymoon, how is she equipped to transcend my child into greatness.

And so there it is people, the pressure. As time would continue and I would go on to look more mature, or more aware, or apply makeup better AND have kids of my own, this open house judgement would subside some but not entirely. Now you might argue, well parents judge teachers of other grades the same don’t they? My answer is No They Don’t Judy. Not in the damn slightest. The reason for this is clear, for many parents, kindergarten is the first full out time to be away from Mom and Dad and that is a lot of psychology shit to get behind. That brings up a whole lotta Mommy issues and Daddy issues that I don’t have time to get into right now. But it makes it EXTREMELY difficult for the teacher to approach the parent with anything, besides your child is perfect, your child is a genius. Think about it this way. Hypothetically speaking, we have a child born to two loving parents. Let’s call him Dean (Sorry I have been watching a lot of Gilmore Girls lately) and Dean has a speech issue that Mom noticed since he was about 2.5. Mom mentions it to Dad, Dad shrugs his shoulders, Mom mentions it to the pediatrician, the ped says let’s give it some time, Grandma notices it, but says nothing because she is terrified of Mom. You see where I am going with this. Then after two full months of school goes by. That’s two full months, of packing perfect lunches with separated clementines and eggs white, two full months of perfectly monogrammed shirts that specify the theme of the day, two full months of adding to Dean’s scrapbook and making fairy houses outside, Dean’s parents come in for parent teacher conferences. The teacher tells them all of Dean’s awesome progress (start with the positive) and observations about his peer interactions and then the teacher mentions towards the end of the conversation, how Dean is having some difficulty picking up rhyming, and some of his speech sounds are not being understood by the teacher or his peers. This conversation sounds innocent doesn’t it reader? Well it isn’t, the teacher has just swung wide open the raging gates of hell on herself. Suddenly this K teacher, who had the best of intentions, will become the topic of every dinner conversation, every spin class, every girls night. This is in part to do with the fact that this teacher, is the first person to point out that Dean is not in fact perfect as the baby book suggested that he be.

Now, let me go on to say that we all want our kids to achieve awesomeness, we do. I totally get it, but kids are going to face uphill battles the same way adults do and just because a teacher points out one of their uphill battles, does not make them a terrible person. Now, I am not so naive to think that after reading this, a kinder parent will look within themselves and think your are right, I should suspend judgement on my teacher because they are really early intervening that shit and helping my kid in the long run. I get it! It’s hard to hear someone else say things about a kid YOU DID NOT PRODUCE, but at the same token K teachers really bare that brunt more than any other grade level. Take fourth grade for example. By that time, Mom has heard in K and then in 1, 2, and then 3rd grade how Dean loves to talk while the teacher is talking, sings Old Town Road in the bathroom, puts ketchup all around little Suzy’s hamburger at lunch and then does the Steven King face when she protests. By fourth grade, Mom and Dad KNOW that shit in and out. They fight over who passed that crap onto Dean and they argue over who will actually go to the conference to listen to it again for the umpteenth time. Are you feeling me yet? The fourth grade teacher does not feel the wrath that the kindergarten teacher feels .

ALSO, and this is probably more widely read about, is some kids are just not ready to be in kindergarten. They just aren’t. One year that I taught kindergarten, half of my class had August, September, October birthdays. Now I’m not getting into redshirting and the whole bit, that’s just another conversation, but some of those summer babies, had never been outside of Mom’s living room and doing much besides watching Paw Patrol. So imagine the pushback when they get inside a classroom of 14 other kids AND NOW they have to do work, and sit and no one will open their juice pouch as soon as they need it. In my experience teaching in other classrooms besides kindergarten, you cannot tell ages when you walk in, like you can in kindergarten. In the world of K, you can work to develop routines, procedures, you can have the best sticker charts, the nicest parents, and you will still have kids that upend your whole day, your nicely planned lessons, because they are just simply not ready to go from Nana’s living room, to your blast of color, stimulus, and learning targets. It’s no one’s fault in particular. Parents have to get to work, kindergarten teachers can’t say the inn is full people and kids have to react how they need to react, but it doesn’t make the job and less easy for K teachers. Not to mention the pressure that K teachers feel to get kids from not knowing how to write their name, to a level D in reading. It’s a hard knock, crazy ass task and we have teachers signing up to do it every durrrrn day. I think kindergarten teachers are under an immense amount of pressure that the general public has absolutely zilch ideas about. K teachers need to parent, feed, discipline and love each individual child in their classrooms, but they also need to be Pintrest perfect, bulletin board ready, and have buckets of centers for hands on learning, but also pencil and paper to get them ready for first grade and don’t forget to intro them to chrome books, but wait isn’t technology bad? What are you doing giving them chrome books Cruella Devil? See the double standard people? I am very proud to have taught in this land for so long. I learned an immense amount doing it, but I also think it is 100% more difficult than other grades. Agree? Disagree? Make sure to let me know.